"Underground" in Oregon
Some recommended reads, from camas to "candlesticks" to rural Black culture
One of the things that I love about where I live is the widespread culture of intentional place-making paired with creative sense-making about place: the many artists and writers shaping how we relate to where we are, past, present, and future.
Just to provide a small sampling, here in Portland one finds groups like City Repair building neighborhood visual identity through street murals, or hyperlocal publications like Buckman Journal. Around the state are any number of projects such as Pine Meadow Ranch, deliberately connecting art, agriculture, and ecology. And of course you have OPB, prolifically producing not just news but podcasts and videos that keep an eye on history, culture, and natural science all at once, along with their regular coverage of all our other artists and place-makers.
And you can throw into that mix Oregon Humanities, a group dedicated not just to cultural programming around the state but to fostering dialogue and discussion as well. They also produce a seasonal magazine, focused on a theme; the theme for Winter 2023 is “Underground,” with writers exploring “things hidden or buried, for better or worse: subcultures and political currents and stories and plants and pollutants.”
I have a very short piece in the issue, where I admit to leaving some strange items hidden in my old basement, but also ask:
Who wants to scrap for a tiny piece of public space in which to exist, only to be threatened with death each day nonetheless? No one. But likewise no one, yet, seems to have quite the right answer for changing the public culture of how we live and move together on our streets—how we make room for everyone.
Read the full piece, “Candlesticks,” on the OH site.
While you’re there, make sure not to miss “Purple Prairie,” Josephine Woolington’s essay on cultural recovery and restoration in the Willamette Valley, with a focus on camas cultivation:
In the way that some Northwest tribes are salmon people, Kalapuyans of the Willamette Valley are camas people. With only one spring run of salmon, but boundless fields of edible plants, Kalapuya people ate plentiful amounts of wapato, yampa, acorns, tarweed, and camas. “Our identities are tied together,” says David Harrelson, who is Kalapuyan and is the cultural resources manager for the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde. “To know yourself and to know a place, it becomes necessary to know both.”
Woolington’s piece (an excerpt from her book Where We Call Home: Lands, Seas, and Skies of the Pacific Northwest) skillfully covers the difficult history of displacement and disenfranchisement of Kalapuyans and other Native people in Western Oregon, touching on everything from the Dawes Act to the struggle for federal tribal recognition and the ensuing decades of work to recover cultural knowledge and practice, and connects all this to the ecology of the Willamette Valley’s camas prairies, which require human interaction—from thinning via harvesting to cultural burning—to thrive.
Let me also recommend, from the same issue, “My Heart Belongs Where the Trees Are,” Bruce Poinsette’s recounting of a road trip to Eastern Oregon to meet Black cultural icons carving out space for themselves in areas often better known for their racism. Poinsette leaves Portland with clear trepidation about traveling through rural towns east of the Cascades, but finds his perspective changed when he returns:
Asking why a Black person would choose to live in Eastern Oregon felt presumptuous before the trip. After speaking with Ransom and Trice, it felt downright arrogant. If anything, we should have left with lessons to bring back to Portland.
I’ll start with myself. My hometown of Lake Oswego has only one piece of public art depicting Black people. Meanwhile, the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center is creating a permanent home in Joseph after making an indelible impression throughout multiple Eastern Oregon towns since 2008. At the same time, Leon Ransom’s brother Kalvin, a former bull rider himself, is working on getting a street in Pendleton named after George Fletcher, to go with the bronze statue.
In the state of Oregon, where the lasting effects of anti-Black exclusion laws can still be felt, these efforts are invaluable. Beyond preserving history and building business, these stories do the necessary work of helping Black Oregonians see themselves wherever they so choose. In the case of Ransom, Trice, and their fellow Black Eastern Oregonians, that place is the country.
If you live in Oregon and like reading pieces like this in print, Oregon Humanities will send you the magazine for free.
Any local place-based writing you love and want to share? Give it a shout-out in the comments.
Thanks for reading. Until next time,
Meg